The present invention relates to an interaction support system and method in which data created under control of a drawing program are utilized to develop an interaction display screen for a run program and actions are defined with respect to arbitrary objects in a defined picture displayed on the interaction screen.
As computer hardware advances, there have been developed many interactive run programs which are based on frequent graphical display. These run programs require not only a program part for computation of numerical values or for problem solution but also a program part for interaction between user and run program through the graphical display such as the understandable indication of computational results or the user's input prompting indication on the screen. Recently, it is not rare that the program part for interaction between user and run program occupies more than 50% of the whole development of the run program. For this reason, in order to improve the development efficiency of the run program, it becomes necessary to support the development of such interaction program part.
In the development of such interactive run program based on graphical display, conventionally, a defined picture desired to be displayed on the screen is prepared and then the program part for causing the display of the same defined picture on the screen is created. For commercial run programs, such display design is often conducted by an art design specialist.
Meanwhile, there has been recently developed such a drawing program that performs such drawing and designing work under control of a computer. Defined pictures for display design of the run programs tend to be often created using such drawing program. Such tendency is because the design results can be stored as data in the computer, the design can be easily modified and edited, and also easily deposited and retrieved. Such drawing program, however, has been originally designed to aim mainly at printing the defined picture on paper, and much consideration has not been paid to the utilization of the design results stored within the computer by other run programs. For this reason, even in the case where a defined picture for the interactive display of a run program is prepared using a computer, it has been necessary to newly create the interactive screen display part of the run program.
Upon developing the interactive screen display part of the run program, if data on the defined picture on the screen drawn by the drawing program in the computer can be used as they are, then the development efficiency of the run program can be improved. A prior art system of utilizing data created by a drawing program to provide an interactive screen for a run program is discussed in a book titled "Towards a Comprehensive User Interface Management System", Computer Graphics, Volume 17, Number 3, July (1983), pp 35-42. In this system, one picture or a plurality of pictures, which are previously created by the drawing program and registered as files, are freely laid out on the screen and actions are defined with respect to the respective pictures to be correlated with processing procedures peculiar to the pictures.
With this system, however, one of the actions can be defined only with respect to one of the pictures previously registered as files and cannot be defined with respect to only part or figures of one picture. This requires, on drawing a defined picture, the need for previous registration of a picture part whose action is to be previously defined, in a separate file. Further, when it is desired to modify that part of a picture whose action is to be defined, it becomes necessary to modify the file organization once more or redraw the picture, which results in a low work efficiency. In addition, data on defined pictures created by the drawing program cannot be utilized in developing a screen display program. Even in the event where the defined picture data can be utilized, different actions cannot be defined with respect to any ones of the constituent elements of the picture, which disadvantageously results in that, at the time of creating a defined picture, different files must be previously provided and stored for different parts of the defined picture whose actions are to be defined.